Pages

Wednesday, 22 February 2012

The excellent Oxford Bibliographies offers exclusive and authoritative research guides on subscription including Atlantic History, Medieval Studies and Military History. Each subject area contains a series of articles that are regularly updated. Included in the material on Victorian Literature is a section on Chartism. The extracts below may be of interest.
‘Chartism has been fortunate in attracting enthusiastic professional and amateur historians with a desire to make their knowledge accessible via the Internet: there are several superb resources run by individuals. Richard Brown’s Looking at History and Stephen Roberts’s Chartism and the Chartists offer individual takes by leading historians on Chartism and include significant commentary on recent events and publications on their respective sites. Mark Crail’s Chartist Ancestors is a major online source containing a wealth of historical information. Ian Petticrew’s Minor Victorian Poets and Authors, originating as a site on Gerald Massey, is the web’s most significant open-access resource on working-class poetry and literary criticism of the period...’
‘Brown, Richard. Looking at History The author of this useful blog on his historical interests has written a highly regarded A-level textbook on Chartism and a 2010 study of the Newport rising in conjunction with Australian and Canadian uprisings. All his posts on Chartism, which include book reviews and scholarly essays and reflections on various aspects of the movement, may be found here. A 2007 essay on Chartist historiography partly updates the published work of Taylor (Taylor 1996) and Messner (Messner 1999), both cited under Historical Studies. Highly recommended.’

Friday, 17 February 2012

The importance and impact of drug taking across social boundaries in the nineteenth century has only recently become a subject of serious historical study. [1] Opium or opiate compounds were used widely in the first half of the nineteenth century and, though the main features of addiction and withdrawal had been known since the 1750s, most doctors still thought of opium not as dangerous or threatening but central to effective medicine. Until Pharmacy Act 1868 opium was on open sale and could be bought in any grocer’s or druggist’s shop. Regular ‘opium eaters’ were accepted in their communities and rarely the subject of medical attention. They were certainly not seen as ‘sick’, deviant or diseased as they were to be by 1900. Lack of access to orthodox medical care, the suspicion of the medical profession and positive hostility to professional medical treatment ensured the position opium held in popular culture as a major form of self-medication. [2] Society generally used opium for sleeplessness, headache or depression and these shaded imperceptibly into non-medical or ‘recreational’ uses.

Opium consumption was particularly high in the Fens in the nineteenth century and, according to an analysis made in 1862, more opium was sold in Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and Manchester than in other parts of the country. The Fens were an unhealthy, marshy area where medical assistance, especially for the poor, was severely limited and where many of the working-classes were prone to ague, rheumatism and neuralgia. The habit was limited to the low-lying areas centring on the Isle of Ely and south Lincolnshire. [3] The largest consumers were the labourers who came from the outlying fens rather than village or town dwellers.

Opium smokers in the East End of London: Illustrated London News, 1 August 1874

Why was opium of such importance in the Fens? There was a tradition of self-medication with opium being used to treat both people and animals. The introduction of new methods of exploiting the land resulted in declining standards of child care and an increasing in the doping of young babies with opiates: infant mortality in Wisbech was 206 per thousand in the 1850s, higher than urban centres like Sheffield. Doping young babies was essential as women could be away from home for long periods of time working on the itinerant ‘gangs’ that became a more source of employment after 1830. Opiates may have been used to dispose of unwanted children, though this was not peculiar to the Fens. Opium could be used as an escape from the perceived reduction of status for the agricultural labourer that resulted from enclosure and drainage. Certainly use for euphoric purposes was not uncommon in the Fens. Dr Rayleigh Vicars wrote in the 1890s:

...their colourless lives are temporarily brightened by the passing dreamland vision afforded them by the baneful poppy.[4]

It is very difficult to estimate the effect opiate use had in the Fens though there may be a connection between it and the high general death rate. In the 1850s, it stood at 22 per thousand in southern Lincolnshire, a figure as high as the environmentally less agreeable industrial areas of Huddersfield and Keighley in Yorkshire.

Reaction to opium eating in the fens, with its population apparently able to control and moderate its consumption was markedly different from the concern expressed about the urban problem. The ‘stimulant’ use of drugs by the urban working-classes was perceived as a threat to public order in a way that did not apply in the Fens. This is indicative of the way in which views of opiate use were coloured by the social and class setting. The use of opium for child doping was attacked in the 1830s. Behind this was a desire to remould popular culture into a more acceptable form and a critique of the basic pattern of child rearing by the working-classes. Using opium as a scapegoat led to criticism of its use being diverted away from the realities of the urban environment to the individual failings of working mothers. The uses of opium by adults and for children in the rest of society went unremarked or were viewed more tolerantly. The writings of Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, both frequent users, attracted a great deal of attention after 1830 and by drawing attention to the habit may have led to a gradual change towards a harsher, more restrictive attitude. [5]

[1] See in particular Berridge, V., and Edwards, G., Opium and the People: Opiate Use in Nineteenth Century England, (Yale University Press), 1987, revised ed., (Free Association), 1999, and Foxcroft, Louise, The making of addiction: the ‘use and abuse’ of opium in nineteenth-century Britain, (Ashgate), 2007.

[3] High opium consumption may have characterised areas like this: there is evidence, for instance, of similar practices among the poor in the Romney Marshes in Kent. See, Beveridge, Valerie, ‘Opium in the Fens in Nineteenth-century England’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol. 34, (1979), pp. 293-313.

Saturday, 11 February 2012

In the early-nineteenth century ale, wine and spirits were cheap and consumed in large quantities. [1] With the dangers of disease from untreated water it was natural for town-dwellers to rely increasingly on alcohol and on water that had been boiled with tea and coffee. People did not believe that local water would ever be safe to drink, as Chadwick’s inspectors found out from London slum-dwellers in the 1840s. The scarcity of drinking water even created the profession of water-carrier. There were alternatives to alcohol: milk, though this was considered a dangerous drink even when fresh; soda-water was not made commercially until 1790 and ginger-beer was not sold in London until 1822. Tea [2] had become a virtual necessity among the working-classes by 1830 and per capital coffee consumption increased faster than tea between 1820 and 1850. [3] But alcohol was more than just a thirst-quencher; it was thought to impart physical stamina, extra energy and confidence. Agricultural labourers, for example, believed that it was impossible to get in the harvest without their ‘harvest beer’. Alcohol was regarded as a painkiller: it assisted dentists and surgeons before the use of anaesthetics, quietened babies and gave protection against infection. It also relieved psychological strain, moderating the sense of social isolation and gloom, and enhanced festivity; drinking places provided a focus for the community. [4]

Before 1800, drinking was not rigidly segregated by rank. Squires, for instance, often drank with their social inferiors. However, by 1830 a measure of social segregation had developed and by 1860 no respectable urban Englishman entered an ordinary public house. [5] Private, as opposed to public, drinking was becoming the mark of respectability. Drinking was also a predominantly male preserve and encouraged men to enjoy better living standards than their wives. On paydays drinking houses were often besieged by wives anxious to get money to feed and clothe their children before it was drunk away.

The drinks trade comprised a large complex of different interests. [6] Of particular importance was the powerful landed interest that helps to explain the regional variations in support for the temperance movement. The barley crop was most important to farmers and without the distillers’ demands for poor-quality grain, lighting lands in Scotland and Ireland might not have been cultivated. Politically the drinks trade drew its prestige from the reliance government placed on drink taxes for national revenue. Attitudes to alcohol were deeply ingrained in British society. Abandoning drinking was, for the working-classes, more than simply not going to public houses. It isolated workers from much popular culture and from a whole complex of recreational activities.

The Reformation Societies that emerged in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were enthusiastic about temperance but the main platform of their movement was the suppression of vice. The temperance movement that emerged in the 1830s differed from them in its concentration on the single issue of spirits, their belief in total abstinence and their repudiation until after 1850 of legislative support. [7] The anti-spirits movement that developed in the 1830s was not a planned movement, at least initially and arose independently at the same time in different places. Why did it develop? It was one of several attempts to propagate a middle-class style of life and arose at a time when drunkenness was already becoming unfashionable. Sobriety received the support of influential groups. Medical opinion, since the 1790s, had increasingly attacked its physical and psychological effects. Evangelicals saw excessive drinking as a sin. Radicals attacked alcohol for its effects on the standard of living of the working-classes and coffee trades wished to popularise their product. The movement would not have made such an impact in the 1830s without the techniques of agitation and mass persuasion used by evangelical humanitarians, especially the anti-slavery campaign. Though any clear link between industrialisation and temperance is difficult to establish, the earliest anti-spirits societies originated in textile manufacturing areas in Ulster and Glasgow and spread to England though the textile centres of Preston, Leeds and Bradford. Some employers welcomed the more reliable workforce that temperance encouraged. Money not spent on drink could, of course, be spent on home-produced goods and some industrialists welcomed the movement as a means of accelerating economic growth and educating people on where to spend their wages.

Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, a debate within the temperance movement raged between those whose attack was focused on spirits while advocating moderation elsewhere and those who believed in total abstinence. But while these approaches gained support among those sections of the working population for whom respectability was an objective, the appeal of temperance and abstinence from alcohol was of more limited appeal for the poor, for whom it still provided temporary escape. [8] Representing the ideals of self-control and self-denial, the temperance movement epitomised middle-class Victorian values. Its values were shaped by the Evangelical movement that was concerned with salvation and the Utilitarian movement that was concerned with efficiency and valued self-control and self-denial. Joseph Kidd, a late-Victorian journalist for the Contemporary Review wrote:

To be able to rule self and transmit to children an organisation (society) accustomed to self-restraint and moderation in all things is one of the chief delights and aspirations to the moral nature of a true man. [9]

[1] Burnett, John, Liquid pleasures: a social history of drinks in modern Britain, (Routledge), 1999, provides an excellent overview.

[5] Jennings, Paul, The local: a history of the English pub, (Tempus), 2007, Haydon, Peter, The English pub: a history, (Hale), 1994, and Kneale, James, ‘‘A problem of supervision’: moral geographies of the nineteenth-century British public house’, Journal of Historical Geography, Vol. 25, (1999), pp. 333-348.

[7] Greenaway, J. R., Drink and British politics since 1830: a study in policy-making, (Palgrave Macmillan), 2003, and Nicholls, James, The Politics of Alcohol: A History of the Drinks Question in England, (Manchester University Press), 2009

[8] Ibid, Harrison, B., Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England 1815-1872, and ibid, Lambert, W. R., Drink and Sobriety in Victorian Wales, provide the best analysis on the issue of temperance and take the story forward into the second half of the nineteenth century.

Monday, 6 February 2012

The emergence of ‘respectability’ as the defining characteristic of acceptable forms of behaviour was a major feature of the changed attitudes to traditional forms of social behaviour. This can be seen in the cases of cruelty to animals, temperance and the growing problem of drug addiction. These three examples of changing attitudes to popular culture illustrate the importance of pressure, either voluntary or through legislation, to control and modify aspects of people’s lives. To those, from all sections of society, who argued for change the issue was one of improving the quality of economic and social life, enhancing respectable attitudes and removing potential tensions and disorder. To those affected, reform attacked what they maintained was their traditional right to enjoy themselves and to escape -- if momentarily -- from their social conditions.

The staging of contests between animals was still one of the most common and popular forms of recreation in England in the early nineteenth century. [1] Cock fighting was the normal feature at fairs and race meetings involving the mingling of all social groups, though only men, and accompanied by heavy betting and often local and regional rivalries. [2] Hunting and hawking were widespread. Small children were notorious for amusing themselves in torturing living creatures but they were merely reflecting the standards of the adult world. This was largely what Keith Thomas calls ‘the cruelty of indifference’ as animals were outside the terms of their moral reference. [3]

During the eighteenth century the feelings of animals became a matter of very great concern and led to agitation in the early nineteenth century culminating in the formation in 1824 of the Society (later Royal Society) for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the passage of legislation against cruelty to horses and cattle in 1822, to dogs in 1839 and 1854 and against animal baiting and cock-fighting in 1835 and 1849. There are various reasons why this changed occurred. There had long been a tradition that unnecessary cruelty to animals was wrong not because of any moral concern with animals but because of its brutalising effects on human character. [4] It did not go unnoticed that the poisoner William Palmer hanged in 1856 had conducted cruel experiments on animals as a boy.

In the early-nineteenth century there was a move away from this point of view towards one that regarded cruelty to animals as morally wrong whether it had human consequences or not. At a less philosophical level animal sports were associated with noise, gambling and disorder. Hunting proved to be a more difficult issue and there is something in the contemporary argument that in the long war against blood sports it was the most plebeian activities that were criminalised and those sports with gentry and upper-class support that survived.

[1] Ritvo, H., The Animal Estate: the English and other creatures in the Victorian Age, (Penguin), 1990, and Harrison, B., ‘Animals and the State in Nineteenth Century England’, English Historical Review, Vol. 88 (1973), pp. 786-820, reprintedin his Peaceable Kingdoms: Stability and Change in Modern Britain, (Oxford University Press), 1982, on cruelty to animals.

[2] Jobey, George, ‘Cock-fighting in Northumberland and Durham during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, Archaeologia Aeliana, 5th ser., Vol. 20, (1992), pp. 1-25, is a good local study.

Wednesday, 1 February 2012

This is an extract from my forthcoming book: Sex, Work and Politics: Women in Britain, 1830-1918

The prolonged demise of Chartism during the 1850s sapped working-class calls for the franchise and the fragmented nature of party politics in the 1850s meant that the issue of parliamentary reform and calls for women’s suffrage, never a vocal force, died away. [1] A concerted campaign for women’s suffrage did not emerge until the mid-1860s. Although votes for women was an obvious area of feminist concern, it was by no means an overriding consideration and before 1914 proved one of the areas of least success for the movement. The constant denial of the parliamentary franchise to women when feminist campaigns were enjoying success in many other areas sets it apart not as their dominant concern but as the demand that successive governments were not willing to concede.

The emergence of the suffrage movement coincided with important changes in the relationship between the state and society. In 1860, a division between the public tasks of government and the private worlds of work, family, religion and property was still largely accepted. By the late 1890s. the expansion of social policies and social responsibilities had transformed and extended the local and national role of the state and the boundaries between what was public and what was private had been significantly blurred as the state increasingly interfered in areas of life previously regarded as private. Enthusiastic and radical local elites established a dominant niche in the enhanced and in some cases elective administration of education, poor relief, public health and in improving the urban environment within the policies and monitoring of the central state. Socially and ideologically, Britain was, or at least gave the impression of being, a more collectively organised country in 1900 than it had been in 1860. [2]

Women approached their demand for parliamentary suffrage from different directions. Their specifically political arguments centred on the issues of equality and representation while ethical arguments ranged from a simple declaration of justice to a belief in woman’s moral superiority and fitness. Suffragists recognised the force of contemporary opinion that potential voters should be demonstrably fit to exercise the franchise freely and intelligently, particularly when presenting the case to Parliament. [3] The transformation of the local and national state called into question the traditional view of citizenship. In 1860, it was assumed that the vote was not a natural right but a historic privilege grounded in an ancient, possible Anglo-Saxon constitution. [4] It was based on the independent man as head of the household and was used to justify the exclusion of women from the franchise. [5]

When Georgian men claimed to be ‘independent, they were drawing upon a political culture that privileged freedom from obligation, self-ownership, patriotism, straightforward manliness and constitutional balance. [6]

When the reforming Whigs legislatively defined the citizen as being an ‘independent man’ in 1832, it opened the door to generations of radical working men who, as breadwinners in their households, claimed that they too met this standard. Although property qualification retained their importance in the debates about electoral reform in the 1860s, Liberals and Radicals began to broaden their definition of property qualification to include the recognition of men’s property in their skills and sought to enfranchise skilled, respectable workers on this basis. The question was whether women were entitled to the vote on the same terms as men, an argument that gained credence as single women were given the municipal vote. Married women, who could not own property of their own before 1882, could not qualify. [7] Equality could simply mean the vote for single women and widows, who might own or rent property and pay their own taxes. Frances Cobbe Power argued that enfranchising a limited group of women might restore:

…the just balance in favour of an educated constituency against the weight of the illiterate male voters now entrusted with the franchise. [8]

After the Reform Act of 1867, which was gradually to extend the franchise to approximately 60 per cent of adult men, including virtually all urban householders, this could include all women who paid rates. After John Stuart Mill unsuccessfully attempted to amend the Reform Bill in 1867 to include women, Lydia Becker led a vigorous campaign for women who paid rates to be placed on the parliamentary register giving them the right to vote in the election of 1868. She suggested that in medieval and early-modern England, property had given women as heads of household the right to exercise the vote or to send deputies to vote on their behalf. She also argued on a legal technicality that the 1867 Act by using the term ‘man’ rather than ‘male person’ had generically included ‘women’. The basis of her campaign was ‘no taxation without representation’ and Becker organised a large number of potential voters in the Manchester area and elsewhere to register as voters. However, presiding barristers were unconvinced by either the historical or linguistic arguments and although a few claims to registration succeeded, they were rejected in a higher court and many feminists were unhappy at the conservative implications of limiting enfranchisement only to single women.

For many women, this approach led them to a surprisingly uncritical acceptance of the property terms of the Victorian male franchise arguing that acceptance of a restricted franchise was a matter of expediency rather than of principle. [9] For instance, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, later leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) recognised existing social and political conditions and maintained that voting was a right granted only to those whose proof of good citizenship or ‘fitness to vote’ could be weighed by the contents of their purse or the amount of their property. This was no more than equality with men, within the existing arrangements. Fawcett was not concerned with the merits or otherwise of the system, but more with its lack of logic: if propertied men could vote, why not propertied women? Feminists who accepted this position were asserting their rights as a female propertied class as distinct from their gender rights. Conservative women, in particular, focused on the contrast between the exclusion of middle-class women and the gradual extension of voting rights to working-class men. Feminists of all political views were unhappy with the performance of successive governments, not merely about women’s questions but in their attitude to a host of social and economic problems. Their analysis of those inadequacies rested on the unbalanced nature of representation that denied the vote to outsiders, women and the propertyless poor. The argument that women’s representation would force Parliament to consider matters previously neglected was as common a rationale as the broader moral reasoning based on a simple notion of equal justice. Not only was an unrepresentative government ‘despotic’ but it would also inevitably ignore the problems of the unrepresented.

The second case for enfranchising all women and men was based on grounds of their equal humanity and natural rights. Many feminists shared the views of the liberal John Stuart Mill, who in his works On Liberty (1859) and The Subjection of Women (1869) had written of citizenship as a means of self-development, offering the freedom to develop the individual’s fullest potential whether male or female. [10] Mill stressed the role of the intelligent, rational and educated citizen, man or woman, in a developed western civilisation. He feared, however, the destructive effects of democracy, a ‘collective mediocrity’ as he called it, arguing for educational qualifications and for forms of representation that safeguarded the power of the educated. Some middle-class suffragists, whether married or single, from the liberal elite, found Mill's ideal of citizenship one which offered them ways of expressing their own need for fulfilment in an active and committed life. For Barbara Leigh Bodichon, the most important effect of women’s suffrage was in increasing patriotism and establishing an ‘unselfish’ public spirit in which feminists could cast themselves as guardians of the national character. This was a less restricted view of citizenship since it did not necessarily exclude married women and was not incompatible with the sexual division of labour. These arguments could rest, explicitly or implicitly, upon the exclusion of others, whether the uneducated poor, or those still termed ‘uncivilised’, beyond the western world. White British women claiming suffrage could use the language of contrast, comparing their own progress and moral character to the drudgery and oppression of women in the rest of the world, a progress that could be carried even further if they were allowed their rightful place.

Others drew on the language of ‘separate spheres’, maintaining that the different qualities that women possessed, and the concerns which arose out of domestic and philanthropic responsibilities, for children, for public health, and for the poor, were needed in public life, locally and nationally. This was a language frequently heard, as women were gradually admitted into some areas of local government, though it also rested on the existence, and the implicit exclusion, of those such as the poor and married working-class women, on whose behalf such responsibilities were claimed. Independence and self-development also featured in their arguments. Political participation would release women’s potential to the full. The grounds on which women from different feminist organisations demanded the vote did not differ radically. Their arguments tended to cluster round these considerations; their clashes occurred far more commonly over tactics, over means rather than ends. All the suffrage bodies founded during the period before the Suffragettes used similar methods of persuasion but differed in how extensive a franchise they were prepared to ask for in the first instance.

Feminist societies largely maintained some distance from direct support for mainstream politics, whether Liberal or Conservative, and criticised both for their entrenched attitudes to women. A growing number of Conservatives began to support women’s suffrage, usually because they believed they would benefit from votes for propertied women. The Conservative argument placed less emphasis on rights and more on the duties of the citizen to the state. Nor was this emphasis confined to the right wing. It was increasingly a feature of both Liberal and Labour suffragism and of feminist propaganda. Many feminists professed political beliefs that coloured their feminist inclinations, but for the most part women of differing political opinions worked together. The various grounds on which women claimed their right to the parliamentary vote represented the entire spectrum of political opinion and reflected contradictions between the reality of women’s powerlessness and prevailing political ideologies.

[1] Saunders, Robert, Democracy and the Vote in British Politics, 1848-1867: The Making of the Second Reform Act, (Ashgate), 2011, pp. 1-26.

[2] The extension of the role of the state can be approached through Corrigan, P., and Sayer, D., The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution, (Basil Blackwell), 1985, Harling, Philip, ‘The powers of the Victorian state’, in Mandler, Peter, (ed.), Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain, (Oxford University Press), 2006, pp. 25-50, and Harling Philip, The Modern British State: An Historical Introduction, (Polity), 2001.

[5] On the development of the notion of the ‘independent man’ see, McCormack, Matthew, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England, (Manchester University Press), 2011, especially pp. 187-200.

[9] A similar view was expressed in the 1830s and 1840s by some radicals who saw the development of male household suffrage as a first step towards universal manhood suffrage. It too led to considerable disagreement within radicalism.